Shane

As a belated followup to this: yes, there was a SMR drive involved. If you're looking at buying new drives, check the manufacturer specs very closely for SMR showing up instead of CMR or PMR, as it might not be mentioned by the seller.

You could use Disk Management in Windows to mount the drives as folders on another drive instead of having their own letters. Everything could then still automatically find and scan the drives. Pick (empty) folders with names that will let you easily identify the corresponding drives. I've verified this works on my own server. For example, create a folder on your C: drive called Disks, then create empty sub-folders under Disks for each of your pooled drives, e.g. d0, d1, d2, d3, then mount those drives to those sub-folders. All done. Keep in mind that if you removed the drive letters for other reasons (e.g. to prevent them being scanned directly by AV or whatever) then you may want to consider whether you can exclude the mounted folder(s) from whatever it is you want to avoid.

It could be due to files on that drive being locked by another program, or by physical problems with that drive? You could also try to "cancel" by restarting the computer, that won't harm the pool.

Did you use the Contact form? That's the preferred way as it's easier for Stablebit to track support tickets that way.

I'd suggest a tool called Everything, by Voidtools. It'll scan the disks (defaults to all NTFS volumes) then just type in a string (e.g. "exam 2020" or ".od3") and it shows all files (you can also set it to search folder names as well) that have that string in the name, with the complete path. Also useful for "I can't remember what I called that file or where I saved it, but I know I saved it on the 15th..." problems.

Only on the drives that make up the pool.

Perhaps options in the Throttling menu?

I'm stumped. There's just been a new stable release (2.2.4.1162) of DrivePool; if that doesn't fix it, might be worth opening a Support ticket as something's going on that literally doesn't add up.

Hmm. Might be a file/NTFS permissions issue. Try a utility called TreeSize Free as administrator? It lacks the shiny pincushion map, but it handles permissions a bit better and might help you track down the file(s) so you can check that. Edit: might also want to run a chkdsk on the drive.

You could try resetting DrivePool via the cog icon, Troubleshooting -> Reset all settings... Also, if you're on Windows 10 that recently updated to build 2004, check that you are running the latest stable release of DrivePool. It should be version 2.2.3.1019.

1. Are the drives that you used to form the pool still showing up in Windows Explorer / Disk Management? 2. When entering the activation ID, did you include the curly braces {} ? Though even in trial mode, your pool should still be visible.

That's not expected behaviour.

Yeah, it shouldn't be doing that. Are D: and G: drives used for any non-pool files? Maybe take a look at D: and G: drives with a program like WinDirStat (running as administrator, with Show Free Space and Show Unknown checked in Options)?

Are you saying that the pools are showing up in DrivePool but not in Explorer? Can you provide a screenshot showing the problem?

It should be possible to write a balancer that controls real time file placement, since that's what the SSD Optimizer and the Ordered File Placement balancer plugins do. DP defaults to writing to the disk with the most free space in bytes rather than by percentage to minimize the possibility of running out of space on the destination disk during writing, because it is not possible to guarantee the size of the write in advance (for example, a 1 TB GB disk with 10% free space has only a fifth of the space available of a 10 TB disk with 5% free space).